This week’s words: Figment Finery Hidden Gain Reactive Gnossienne n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand. Layer Naughty Feeling Hormones Imitation Puissant (powerful, mighty, potent)

Rudy Gnossienne and I went to school together. He was one of those boys you thought there was more to than met the eye. Rudy was an old kid. He’d always appeared older than the rest of us, but we put it down to his tough upbringing.

He was a kid we suspected he had layers to him. Each as hidden as the next one.

But occasionally he’d give up a secret about himself. We thought he was being naughty one day coming to school in a finery that none of us had seen before and we thought our teacher, Sister St Basham, would have a fit over. It was the lace down the front of his school shirt that gained her attention.

Now, Sister St Basham was a most puissant person. I’m sure in hindsight it was her hormones that played an active part in her behaviour, but she had the ability to swing her skirts, and her rosary beads which hung from the leather belt around her expansive girth could cut you across the calves if she was on task.

Sister was a very reactive person, the sort of John Wayne of the nunnery. Shoot first and ask questions later.

Anytime we questioned her motives she’d remind us that what we were claiming was obviously a figment of our imaginations.

Rudy was feeling aggrieved by her reaction and did the best imitation of upset that I had ever seen. I never knew he had it in him, but as I said Rudy was a boy of great depth and that day wound Sister St Basham around his little finger.

Oh I love this Michael! My mom went to Catholic school. I also know about young people who seem so much older. Sam had a classmate in college who was 19, he acted exactly like an old man sweater vests the whole nine yards. We happened to run into him when my mom was visiting. Bare in mind Sam and I were like 25 or so and my mom asks oh is he one of your teachers? Even my mom thought he was an old man!